Over the last decade consumers have become accustomed to the convenience of wireless communication systems. This has resulted in a tremendous increase in the demand for wireless telephones, wireless data transmission and wireless access to the World Wide Web. Since the amount of available RF spectrum is fixed, the need to utilize the RF spectrum more efficiently has become paramount.
CDMA communication systems have shown promise in the effort to provide more efficient utilization of the RF spectrum, particularly Broadband Code Division Multiple Access™ or (B-CDMA™) communication systems. B-CDMA™ communication systems permit many communications to be transmitted over the same bandwidth, thereby greatly increasing the capacity of the RF spectrum. In a B-CDMA™ communication system, an information signal at the transmitter is mixed with a pseudorandom “spreading code” which spreads the information signal across the entire communicating bandwidth. The spread signal is upconverted to an RF signal for transmission. A receiver, having the same pseudorandom spreading code, receives the transmitted RF signal and mixes the received signal with an RF sinusoidal signal generated at the receiver by a first-stage local oscillator (LO) to downconvert the spread spectrum signal. The spreaded information signal is subsequently mixed with the pseudorandom spreading code, which has also been locally generated, to obtain the original information signal.
In order to detect the information embedded in a received signal, a receiver must know the exact pseudorandom spreading code that was used to spread the signal. All signals which are not encoded with the pseudorandum code of the receiver appear as background noise to the receiver. Accordingly, as the number of users that are communicating within the operating range of a particular base station increases, the amount of background noise also increases, making it difficult for receivers to properly detect and receive signals. The transmitter may increase the power of the transmitted signal, but this will increase the noise as seen by other receivers. Therefore, increasing the signal-to-noise ratio of a received signal without requiring a corresponding increase in the transmission power of the signal is desirable.
One way to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of a received signal is to ensure that the first stage local oscillator (LO) at the receiver is at the same frequency as the received RF carrier signal. If there is a slight frequency offset, the offset will manifest itself in the baseband section of the receiver as a phase error on the decoded QPSK symbol, resulting in a degradation of the quality of the communication.
Accordingly, it is critical to properly detect the frequency of the received RF carrier signal in order to optimize the quality of the received signal.